If you tried to visit Natural News and several of our affiliated websites including popular search engine GoodGopher.com over the past 48-plus hours and were unsuccessful, you certainly were not alone. That’s because we were hit with a highly sophisticated DDoS — direct denial of service — attack that our founding editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, believes was directed by a U.S. government agency.

In an interview, Adams explained that the offensive was very likely generated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding a White House petition seeking a moratorium on childhood vaccines.

The DDoS attack was at “a very high level,” Adams said, adding that its level of sophistication means “it must have cost somebody a lot of money” to coordinate and carry out.

“It seems the attack has been linked to the White House petition story,” he noted, adding that the petition link went down as well, but has since been reinstated.

“Somebody’s spending a lot of money because” the attack “lasted for more than 12 hours. At one point, there were over a quarter of a million connection requests per second.” That’s “a level of attack that requires a tremendous amount of coordination and funding.”

“We suspect that the CDC is using taxpayer money to fund a cyber warfare campaign against vaccine truth web sites” like Natural News, Adams continued. “We already know the CDC is using taxpayer money to run vaccine propaganda, to pay for pro-vaccine messages in pop culture” like movies, TV shows, and other entertainment venues.

“Cyber warfare is just another tactic they’re using” to target anyone who disagrees with the pro-vaccine message, Adams said, noting that the attack Natural News suffered for much of Sunday evening and Monday morning was too sophisticated to have been carried out by a small group.

“This is probably millions of dollars’ worth of coordination, malware, zombie PCs that have been taken over,” he said. “It’s not an amateur running kiddie scripts.”

— Perform large scale studies of vaccinated and un-vaccinated children.

— Ban direct pharmaceutical advertising to consumers and allow such advertising only to medical professionals.

Adams said he and his engineering team have been hard at work adding extra security to the Natural News site and related networks.

“To defend against the attack, additional defenses were put in place while a firewall upgrade took place, including browser challenge logic that deflected 90% of the DDoS attack traffic. The firewall upgrade means that attacking parties will now need to expend significantly more resources to interfere with Natural News traffic in the future,” he wrote in this post.

He is also seeking assistance in positively identifying the responsible party. “As part of our efforts to expose the criminality and corruption of the CDC, Natural News is offering a $50,000 reward for evidence that conclusively links the CDC to cyber attacks on vaccine truth websites,” he wrote.

Stay tuned.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.